Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An ARM killer from IIT-M?

factordaily.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 130 posts

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#11

Post by throw3192312 »

It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neither has Baidu, nor Tencent, nor Wechat. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba, and is on a long drawn collision course towards merging with Amazon. The startups I've seen generally seem to target foreign markets, or to service people who service foreign markets; this is inherently a tiny subset of India's population.

Considering the 'prestige' and money that comes with working in the US, I'd be very surprised if the country can ever accumulate enough talent to do anything fundamentally significant (esp. since all of the relevant Education/Industry is entirely Anglophone).

I also feel there is generally a lot of self-flattering that goes on, often for this very reason. I'm old enough to remember the embarrassment that was to be 'India's answer to OLPC' (also conceived at an IIT of note).

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#12

Post by sitkack »

These folks have no qualms with ARM. They are building their own chips using the RISC-V ISA. This literally has nothing to do with ARM or Intel.

The ISA isn't the hard part in building a chip, the building the chip part is. The thing they have going for using an existing ISA is that they get kernel and toolchain support.

They have many millions in support in the project and see all the reasons why they will succeed. What would be awesome is if AMD gave them assistance in getting their parts running in EPYC sockets.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#13

Post by r_singh »

throw3192312 wrote: post #11

It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neither has Baidu, nor Tencent, nor Wechat. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba, and is on a long drawn collision course towards merging with Amazon. The startups I've seen generally seem to target foreign markets, or to service people who service foreig…

I agree with this comment so much, it hurts.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#14

Post by microcolonel »

CalChris wrote: post #8
microcolonel wrote: post #6

Glad to hear that they'll be taping out one of the Shakti chips so soon. Can't wait to see what comes of the higher-end server (or workstation, if you're me) chips. That said... > “The capitalist computing bourgeoisie want to enslave us all with proprietary processing architectures, but the proletariat eventually produces its own processor alternative – an ISA for and by the people, where instruction sets aren’t subj…

RISC-V was developed by the state, in particular, by UC Berkeley, a public school. And IIT Madras is also another public school. So again, a branch of the Indian state is developing this Shakti processor. There's really nothing capitalist about this at all.

I'm sure Bluespec, TSMC, SiFive, NXP, Samsung, Qualcomm, Microsemi, Micron, Huawei, and NVIDIA don't think of it like that, the RISC-V foundation is also not UC Berkeley. Also, strictly speaking the UC system ain't the state, if they were, they would not be allowed to generate copyrights from work produced by employees. IBM at least partially (if not completely) covered the fabrication of the original UCB RISC-V chips.

Though I'd generally agree in the case of IIT Madras, which is specifically engaging in a state effort to reduce import dependence in microelectronics (especially for defense and national infrastructure).

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#15

Post by zaptheimpaler »

throw3192312 wrote: post #11

It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neither has Baidu, nor Tencent, nor Wechat. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba, and is on a long drawn collision course towards merging with Amazon. The startups I've seen generally seem to target foreign markets, or to service people who service foreig…

With luck, Trump, the tightening H-1B/GC situation and the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide will push some talented people who would've otherwise left to stay in India. Modi has also pushed to make starting a business a quick process w.r.t paperwork.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#16

Post by ChuckMcM »

To be honest though building a processor these days is not exactly difficult. That is especially true if you start with someone else's ISA and they have already created a GCC or LLVM back end for it. I was at Sun during the development of SPARC and as part of the Systems group we got to see a lot of the trade offs up front but these days transistors are not nearly so scarce. If you stick to 30 - 50Mhz for your first round you can simulate pretty much power on to shell prompt in a reasonable amount of time. Then there are the process specific issues that TSMC or Global Foundries or whomever will help you with translating your HDL into their most reliable node (probably 45nm or 90nm at the moment), then you'll build a test chip and it will likely do everything you want it to do and it will cost 10x what an equally powerful ARM chip will do, so you will really really want to use your chip instead of that one if you're going to design it into something. And that something has to be popular enough that you sell at least a million of them, otherwise you're going to eat a lot of Nonrecurring engineering (NRE) cost.

It is certainly possible, but it is a long game and you have to survive the early years. Go back and read the history of ARM (and Acorn), Intel (and IBM), Motorola (and Sun and Apple), and Power PC (and Cisco). Then read the history of the Z8000, the NS32032, the AMD88000, and the TI 9900. When you look at the history from where we sit today you will see that building a new CPU is the easiest thing in the world, staying alive until it is relevant is exceptionally difficult and requires quite a bit of luck in addition to good design.

I wish these guys a lot of luck, I would love to see a fully open architecture be even half as successful as ARM has been. They have to walk into this with their eyes open though, it is not going to be easy.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#17

Post by reacharavindh »

throw3192312 wrote: post #11

It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neither has Baidu, nor Tencent, nor Wechat. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba, and is on a long drawn collision course towards merging with Amazon. The startups I've seen generally seem to target foreign markets, or to service people who service foreig…

Very unfortunate but true. Here’s to hoping atleast this time would be different. We need to look past the “If it’s India it has to be ridiculously cheap” factor. Everytime the Indian Space Agency reports an achievement, I always look for the “done for the first time, learnt about X” than the “look, I have done the common Space thing at 1/10th of the cost”. I wonder what all the talented ISRO would achieve if they had resources in the scale of NASA...

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#18

Post by happy-go-lucky »

> The landscape is full of thick trees that have set down roots for decades. Bats, deers, and monkeys, seemingly comfortable with the few thousand bicycle-riding students, academics, and staff on campus, are easy to spot. The air, thanks to a recent bout of rains in Chennai, is as good as a hill station

In addition to the above description, a picture should have been inserted above or below the paragraph.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#19

Post by retailbuyout »

microcolonel wrote: post #6

Glad to hear that they'll be taping out one of the Shakti chips so soon. Can't wait to see what comes of the higher-end server (or workstation, if you're me) chips. That said... > “The capitalist computing bourgeoisie want to enslave us all with proprietary processing architectures, but the proletariat eventually produces its own processor alternative – an ISA for and by the people, where instruction sets aren’t subj…

Really? Free and open source software—in this case, an unencumbered ISA—seems like an easy parallel to communally managed means of production.

Of course an implementation would be far more useful, as it would be the likely target for lawsuits.

Re: An ARM killer from IIT-M?

#20

Post by PeachPlum »

zaptheimpaler wrote: post #15
throw3192312 wrote: post #11

It's definitely to be welcomed, but India barely has the kind of interests, state-apparatus or companies that'd want something like this to succeed. India neither has Baidu, nor Tencent, nor Wechat. They have Flipkart, which is barely an Alibaba, and is on a long drawn collision course towards merging with Amazon. The startups I've seen generally seem to target foreign markets, or to service people who service foreig…

With luck, Trump, the tightening H-1B/GC situation and the recent wave of xenophobia worldwide will push some talented people who would've otherwise left to stay in India. Modi has also pushed to make starting a business a quick process w.r.t paperwork.

Resisting mass immigration to leach from your welfare state is not xenophobic.
Post reply on HN